Judges 2:16-23, Acts 13:16-25

The people vowed themselves to a renewed covenant in the days of Joshua taking the commands of God freshly upon themselves as their fathers had done, choosing that in that day they and their houses would serve the Lord. But just as their fathers, they did not walk in obedience, they did not obey the commands that God had given them. And they did not avoid the penalty of the Law of God. They fell back into slavery and oppression, warfare and violence. The very Canaanites that they were sent out by God to slay and to destroy – which they failed to do – were now as a result of their own disobedience and failure to match the demands of the Law, being punished and suffering under the Canaanites. This is just as every fall into sin. The sin is always our choice, and the punishment is always of our own design. We so often lift up our eyes to heaven and say O God why have you cursed me so. Yet these things aren’t of God’s design but our own. There are many apt biblical examples of sin leading to a punishment of sins own making, Adam’s fall, Cain’s curse, Noah’s shame, the list goes on throughout the generations. It’s likely that you don’t need any examples to be given to you. I’m quite sure that you, whoever you are, can think of an example of this in your own life from the last year, month, week, maybe even from today where you did something you knew was wrong and the consequence of that was a direct result of what you did. You don’t have to look terribly hard to find out that drunkenness causes liver failure, promiscuity to sexually transmitted diseases or that violence begets more violence. Perhaps the most important of all examples that one could think of though, is the temptation to unbelief begotten by sin. It was breaking the command against intermarrying and intermixing with the Canaanites that brought the downfall of Israel in the time of the judges – but this is no less relevant to you today. Nothing is more tempting in way of the abandonment of faith than is sin. Doing the sin sounds nice, and God prevents you from that sin. Better get Him out of the equation, you might say. Or maybe you did the sin, and now Satan accuses you and declares you categorically unsaved. And so God sent Judges to Israel to save them from their sin and their destruction. And they did so successfully. But again Israel would fall – and again Israel would cry out to God. And again he would rescue them, and again, and again, and again. This is so often how we picture the Christian life before us. A life of trying not to screw up, and praying for forgiveness when we do, and then mustering all we can for that to be our last screw up and then again we pray for forgiveness, so on so forth until we get dull to the whole ordeal, throwing all effort to the wind and shrugging our sins away, clearly if they’re so easily forgiven they aren’t that bad after all. Right? Until finally we stop asking for forgiveness altogether and we grudgingly slunk up the steps to Christ’s throne of Judgment and make a final declaration of detached apathy before we voluntarily seat our own selves in hell to save Christ the work. And if that were where God stopped at redeeming you, then you’d be right to do so. But He didn’t. God began by creating His people from a barren impossibility, redeemed them from their self-imposed slavery to sin, walked with them through their own futile attempts to rid themselves of sin and then turned them away from themselves and toward the king. The Christian life isn’t about a cycle of trying not to sin and then begging for forgiveness, the Christian life is about Christ, and His finished work. How many of us will be found on that last day still doing what is right in our own eyes, abstaining from pornography, reading our bibles, maintaining purity of speech – how many will be found begging for a Judge to come and pull them back up from their failures to do so – and how many will be resting under the Lordship of Christ the King and His finished work? Be careful how you hear, God has brought Israel a saviour – believe this.